14 - 20 December 2000
Issue No.512
|
Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 14 - 20 December 2000 Issue No.512 |
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
Not playing Nice
As a crisp winter dawn broke over the trendy French Riviera city of Nice on Thursday, 7 December, thousands of riotous anti-globalisation protesters gathered to march on the convention centre hosting the European Union's (EU) summit. "Death to money", "No to the Europe of capital", "Europe is not for sale", were some of the more colourful slogans hurled at the high-powered EU delegations. Barred from entering the barricaded convention centre zone, young women and men -- many of them masked -- clashed with riot police, who threw tear gas canisters into the crowds and used their batons freely against the marchers. Undaunted, the protesters retaliated by flinging bottles and pelting security forces with stones. Responding to police brutality, the protesters chanted "Police everywhere, justice nowhere," as they battled their way to Nice's posh city centre.
Denied the right to confront and challenge the politicians' neo-liberal agenda, protesters resorted to venting their rage Seattle-style, smashing police vehicles and setting fire to a branch of the National Bank of Paris. After the police finally managed to beat early morning protesters into submission, Nice mayor Jacques Peyrat -- a leading member of French President Jacques Chirac's Rally for the Republic (RPR) Party -- ventured into the streets to inspect the damage inflicted on his elegant city. Walking down a shopping area littered with spent tear gas shells, posters and graffiti, the mayor was greeted by enraged hecklers screaming: "Peyrat! Fascist!"
East of Nice, at the Italian border town of Vintimiglia, a group of 1,200 Italian communists remained stranded at the border. Refused entrance to France, the anti-globalisation protesters found their right to freedom of expression denied, despite the fact that this basic right is enshrined in the European Convention Safeguarding Human Rights -- to which all EU countries are signatories.
Meanwhile, back at the summit, President Chirac was quick to denounce the protesters. Hosting the meeting and embarrassed by the anti-globalisation movement's vociferous stand, Chirac hastily condemned the anti-globalisation movement as "destructive" and "violent." Addressing a press conference, Chirac dismissed any contention of police brutality, instead blaming marchers for their "violence" that was "contrary to democratic principles." At the other end of the political spectrum, Socialist French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin played it safe. While partially concurring with his conservative boss, Jospin stopped short of alienating his labour constituency and carefully differentiated between two types of demonstrations: "peaceful protesters from labour organisations" and acts of violence, "which distort the very causes we are claiming to defend."
Notwithstanding Chirac's and Jospin's surface dismissal of the movement, the fact remains that anti-globalisation forces are singularly powerful in Europe. On the night preceding the 7 December street riots, an estimated 60,000 trade union members, supported by some 22 international NGOs, marched to protest the EU's neo-liberal anti-worker agenda. At Nice, the largest single labour umbrella union was the Brussels-based Confédération Européenne des Syndicats (CES), followed closely by the 40,000-strong French labour organisation Confédération Paysanne (CP). In June, CP organised a militant march in Millau, in southern France, to show solidarity with CP leader José Bové, on trial for destroying a McDonald's restaurant.
Also prominent within the NGO protest movement are the London-based human rights group Amnesty International, the France-based Médecins du monde (Doctors of the World), Action contre la faim (Action against Hunger) and the militant Marche européenne contre le chômage et la précarité (March against unemployment and insecurity). Creeping global neo-liberalism, with its correlatives of poverty and unemployment, is at the centre of the anti-globalisation movement. In the wake of sweeping economic deregulation, the EU's official unemployment record has surged to 35 million. Workers' organisations are struggling against the ravages caused by unbridled, American-style capitalism gnawing at the continent's social fabric.
Labour organisers contend that the EU has consistently mobilised politicians to serve corporate aims and promoted "social dumping" -- slashing of social benefits -- at the expense of workers' rights. At Nice, the contested but much-touted European Charter aimed to link the political and economic sectors continent-wide -- an attempt to override more progressive standing national or transnational legislation. Thus, the charter defines the right to work as the right be employed and gain free access to the services of employment agencies -- whereas the relevant International Labour Organisation statute defines the right to work as an essential human right. The right to housing is similarly reduced to aid in finding accommodation in lieu of guaranteeing state-subsidised low-income housing.
Along the same lines, workers' rights to representation, collective bargaining, health and welfare benefits are so loosely defined that they pave the way to massive corporate abuses, and provide management with a rich network of legal loopholes. Emilio Gabaglio, secretary-general of the European Confederation of Syndicates, had to struggle for weeks on end to include the right to strike into the charter, the French monthly Le Monde Diplomatique reported.
Since the March Lisbon EU Summit, social dumping is the order of the day. The post-Lisbon theme has called for implanting a strong business presence within the EU to promote "competitiveness", "innovation" and "creativity." In practical terms, this should be achieved by converging and consolidating the interests of the political and economic sectors as defined by big business. Coined by the powerful European Roundtable of Industrialists (ERI), the buzzwords "innovation" and "creativity" effectively refer to the creative destruction of the modern welfare state in order to unleash the "creative potential of European industry."
In a 1998 report entitled "Job Creation and Competitiveness through Innovation", the ERI outlines the nuts and bolts of its strategy. One of the main tenets is "enhancing the flexibility of labour markets," which translates as destroying jobs with the overriding goal of remaining competitive in a deregulated market. And who can do this better than the modern CEO turned politician? Or the politician serving the CEO, for that matter? It was against this corporate political fusion and its "creative" assault on their livelihood that workers took to the streets in Nice.
Related sites:
The Nice European Council Summit web site
Amnesty International
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||
